48 Trojan Herrings & Tripidium (2009)

ISBN 978-1-906742-29-4

[The] poems honour the poetic spirit of Borges, questioning, contemplating, wondering, following the wavelets as they ripple away from person or an event, engaging the most treasured of all gifts - poetic imagination - to follow them upstream or downstream. A beautiful sense of puzzlement, of mystification, of gratidtude, pervades all. Questions go unanswered. Some calls find no echo. Some stones skimmed across the surface of the water skip to a distant shore, some drop into the depths. Here is poetry. William Rowlandson, (from the Introduction) Kent University, Canterbury, England

Hopkins and Wellbeloved are the only modern poets whose work I will take out of the house with me, to read in a park or a cafe, for example. In Praying for Flow, I have found new companions on the path: enigmatic, humorous, spirited, profound and wise. And all in a language which is as accessible as it is refined and potent. Here, art is raised to a new nature through the alchemy of Wellbeloved’s sensitive awareness. Joseph Azize, Visiting Fellow, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

Sophia Wellbeloved writes with beguiling wisdom on the subtle interplay of contemporary life and ancient mysticism; like her debut collection, her new work serenely encompasses philosophy, physics, theology and a wry female gaze through and into the waterfall of the world. Here, though, in this poem in four parts, a sustained and heightened sense of form compels a yet more satisfying amplification of her themes. Captivating, mesmerising, in its long, confluent unspooling of personal revelations, fables, and meditations on illusory dualisms, Praying For Flow powerfully enacts the sublime current it invokes.

Memories, reassurances, speculations, all quietly pour forth: yet despite the cascading variety of her imagery and contemplations, in Wellbeloved’s poetic universe the human urge to classify and judge is dispersed—suspended in language like dust motes in a sun-stream through a veiled, yet open window.

Sophia Wellbeloved was born in Dublin and when her father went to join the navy at the start of WW2 she and her mother moved to Innis Mor, the largest of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. They lived in the cottage used in filming Robert J. Flaherty’s 1934 film Man of Aran.

Wellbeloved was a member of the Gurdjieff Society in London for about fourteen years, and her academic interest in western esotericism led her to explore Gurdjieff’s writing at King’s College, London. She has published 48 Trojan Herrings & Tripidium (Waterloo Press, 2009) and Tripidium now takes its rightful place in the complete tetralogy Praying for Flow. Her scholarly books include Gurdjieff, Astrology & Beelzebub’s Tales, (Solar Bound, 2002) and Gurdjieff: the Key Concepts (Routledge, 2003).

She is director of Lighthouse Editions, a small independent publishing company, and of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Western Esotericism and lives in Cambridge, England.